Noob question about multi video cards

[98707]

I'm throwing in another video card inside my Mac Pro (yeah I ended up getting it and I love it) and I wanted to know.. Does the order the video cards are inside your computer affect its performance. For example my stock Nvidia Geforce card is in the bottom PCI slot.. If I throw in the ATI x1950 into the second to bottom slot will it run games slower than say if I put the ATI card on the bottom and the Nvidia in the higher PCI slot?

 

[aaronw1986]

I believe you need matching video cards? Even if not, multiple vards only will help with multiple monitors, it's not like SLI on a windows machine.

 

[98707]

Well I had read that video cards do not have to be identical, they must just run the same driver. I'm not too concerned with dropping my nvidia card for the ati but is there full consensus that they both cannot work together.

Now again though, say I have two different video cards.. An ati x1950 and an ati radeon hd 2600, pretend I didn't use the crossfire connector.. Would the computer perform differently for games depending on the order the cards were installed?

 

[aliasfox]

If you're not trying to do Crossfire or SLI (neither of which the Mac supports), any two video cards would be fine. However, you may want to install the x1900XT in the first slot, as it is PCI-E x16, which is faster than the slot next to it, which is x4, and #3 is x8, and #4 is x4. Therefore, the x1900xt will run fastest in the x16 slot, the other cards... somewhat less important because they're significantly slower anyway. You're going to want to run games/3D on that Radeon, as well.

How many monitors are you trying to hook up? Each card can natively support two screens already, right?